Well, I sent an e-mail to Björn Eiderbäck something on the order of a month ago to ask him permission to translate his book Objektorienterad Programmering i Smalltalk into English.

He finally got back to me. He was on vacation and, on top of that, somehow my request landed in his junk folder. I never would have checked for it. This must be a good omen. He and the coauthors got back to me and they're all like "Jadååå, bra idée Epic Fail Guy" and I'm all like "*eh heh heh heh* yeah! ... 'tack så himla mycket' *heh heh heh* this is gonna be cool *eh heh heh heh* (yeah)"

Unlike an early twentieth century fiction by Gustaf Hellström I tried to translate earlier (never finished it), I'm actually moving at a decent clip this time because the book is written is modern Swedish and more importantly, it's facklitteratur not fiction ... the neural net processor is much better equipped for tasks that don't involve ambiguity, feelings, or shades of meaning.

And, check this out, he said we should coauthor a new foreword. How elite is that? How elite will that look on university applications?

Oh and at one point, the book says that not using code libraries to write a program would be like assembling a dining room table by "buying woodland, felling a tree, drying it, cutting it into planks, planing the planks, then putting them together with bolts forged of iron from your own mine". I am sorely tempted to add a footnote saying something about IKEA. Should I? Answer honestly. I don't want to ruin my wyrd but I don't want to pass up on a good jibe either.

I guess the footnotes should be kept to the very minimum, and only if they really help the translation.I suppose there is something about Sweden and IKEA that might not be there for English readers, but strictly speaking, it doesn't seem so much a translation issue.